“Yes, yes, I know.” The young man got off the box impatiently.
Caleb tugged at one of its handles.
“Lord, that’s lugsome!” he said, letting the long heavy chest subside. “Ef you ain’t come back rich, you’ve come back middlin’ powerful. All the way from Chipstone!” He clucked his tongue admiringly.
Having once left the miracle undenied, and feeling the situation now altogether beyond explanation to the bucolic intellect, Will again silently acquiesced in the Herculean imputation and took the other handle. “But why didn’t you bring a cart or a truck?” he asked as they began walking cumbrously towards the bridge.
“Ain’t got nowt but a wheelbarrow,” Caleb explained. “Times is changed—-Oi ain’t looker no more, and there’s two housen now. Old Peartree got to have a separate door, but ’twas a good bargain Oi put my cross to with the son o’ the Cornish furriner what Oi warked for these thirty-nine year. Mother will have it she’d ha’ made a cuter deal, she bein’ a dapster in figgers and reckonin’ out to a day when the New Jerusalem will be droppin’ down, but Oi don’t howd with women doin’ men’s business, bein’ as your rib can’t be your head.”
“I quite agree,” said Will, surprised to find such enlightened sentiments in his queer old parent. “But tell me about Ben and Isaac and the others.”
“They don’t write neither. We was lookin’ to you to tell us about the others as went furrin. Ben should be a barber in America, and they say as Christopher’s got a woife, colour o’ coffee.”
“Nonsense, dad!”
“Well, maybe ’twas Isaac.”
“No Flynt would marry a nigger woman,” said Will decisively.